"The Samba Team disapproves strongly of the actions taken by Novell on November 2nd. One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software. The patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement. It deals with users and creators of free software differently depending on their 'commercial' versus 'non-commercial' status, and deals with them differently depending on whether they obtained their free software directly from Novell or from someone else. The goals of the Free Software community and the GNU GPL allow for no such distinctions."

"Switching the linux kernel to GPLv3 (assuming you can get *all* the copyright holders to agree) changes nothing. Changing every single GPL'd package in existence to GPLv3 still changes nothing.

Finally, after the debacle involving Kororaa a few months back, the last group that should be talking about licenses that divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other is the Free Software Community. "

I disagree.

I think you are also taking this out of context.

First of all, if you want to have absolute freedom, please, pick a BSD style license.

That way, you can help turn the computing industry into a free slave labor market for the corporate types.

FSF advocates A TYPE of freedom, not freedom from everything, also known as chaos. So saying that FSF is somehow subversive is a twisted and sick perspective.

The FSF specifically prevents many things, which I won't recant here as anyone can read about them in the current GPL v2 license.

However, what V3 protects you against is the freedom to subvert the V2 license. Which essentially is what V3 of the GNU Public license is.

Specifically, you are restricted from preventing people appropriating your work, without contribution back into the community of GPL copyright holders, through the use of encryption or DRM submarine schemes.

Make no doubt. The powers that be have taken notice about this thing called GNU Software, and they want it dead in the worst kind of way. They have all sorts of subversive tactics planned one is under way at Novell, right at this very instant.

Like it or not, if the community doesn't move to support GNU v3 as is, or something very close to it, you will quickly find lots of GNU software to run on ZERO new hardware.

They, the enemy, the closed source community, the corporate software manufacturers who believe they actually invent software and only THEY have the right to produce software, WILL obtain their goals, as long as people like YOU exist.

Make no doubt. The powers that be have taken notice about this thing called GNU Software, and they want it dead in the worst kind of way. They have all sorts of subversive tactics planned one is under way at Novell, right at this very instant.

I wish I could say that you are paranoid. But unfortunately I think you are right.

Are you running X-Windows? How about apache? If so, you're contributing to corporate slavery, by your admission. Or is that *only* the BSD license, not the MIT or Apache licenses?

The FSF specifically prevents many things, which I won't recant here as anyone can read about them in the current GPL v2 license.

However, what V3 protects you against is the freedom to subvert the V2 license. Which essentially is what V3 of the GNU Public license is.

Yes, we all know that the FSF is all about telling me what I can't do with software I wrote. Er... wait... How's that go again?

Actually, the GPLv3 is designed to deal with DRM, and something of a loophole in the GPLv2. One that the FSF wishes to close, and Linus doesn't-- well, actually, I don't think he *likes* DRM, he just feels that the consumer should be smart enough to reject it, rather than legislating against it.

Specifically, you are restricted from preventing people appropriating your work, without contribution back into the community of GPL copyright holders, through the use of encryption or DRM submarine schemes.

*sigh*. You people need to do your homework. Tivo's code was actually contributed back to the community, as required by the GPL.

You can't modify it and run it on their hardware though. The hardware won't run it without the code meeting a checksum. Which, even if you could, is a violation of the user agreement you agreed to when you bought the thing. You don't like it? DON'T BUY TIVO.

They, the enemy, the closed source community, the corporate software manufacturers who believe they actually invent software and only THEY have the right to produce software, WILL obtain their goals, as long as people like YOU exist.

As a network administrator, I thank you for recognizing the importance of my job. Nobody gets anything done if the servers aren't up, the mail system isn't running smoothly, and the packets aren't flowing. I don't think that's how you meant it, though.

Honestly, without corporate support of the GPL, and open source products, most GPL products would die by the wayside as their programmers have to get real jobs. XGL is a good example-- Everyone's praising the new and shiny graphics Linux has developed over the last year. Here's a quote from Slashdot, however:

"Jon Smirl, one of two main developers for Xgl and Xegl (a version of X layered on top of OpenGL and rendering directly to the linux framebuffer, similar to Apple's Quartz Extreme) is calling it quits. Citing two years of effort without pay, a shortage of interest from developers, and no hope of release for more than a year, Jon is moving on."

That was August 11, 2005. Novell, the evil corporation of greed and slavery, hired David Reveman, who got a working prototype up and running. The community claimed Novell was going to create a closed-source fork of X, that only they could use.

Within a matter of weeks, the project was released (as planned) back into the community as open source, and everyone has benefited.

If that's the kind of evil Novell is doing, I say the Linux community needs more evil if it's going to prosper. Problem is, I honestly believe that the FSF doesn't want Linux to succeed commercially.